Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004

This was a difficult game to benchmark with. Anand struggled for a long time to work something out that got around the randomly generated weather. We finally got a benchmark together, but we had to turn off weather completely. As time allows, we may introduce another benchmark that incorporates the weather feature in a repeatable fashion. For this test, FRAPS was used to determine the average framerate while flying over a specified section of sea and land.

Clearly this test shows ATI as the leader in performance for this MS game. CPU scaling should also prove to be valuable as it seems like the ATI cards want to go further but they are just being held back by the rest of the system.